Don't let the laughter distract you,

Huckabee is someone we need to keep an eye on.

Sara of Orcinus writes:

Why Target the Southern Baptists?
Some have questioned my suggestion that if local progressives with limited resources need to do some triage, they should start by aiming their monitoring efforts at their neighborhood Southern Baptists. This recommendation was based mainly on their previous record: the SBC is the second-largest Christian denomination in the country after the Roman Catholic Church; yet they have demonstrated, over and over, a blithe willingness to break the law and abridge the civil rights of people they don't like. It would be brain-dead of us to expect that's going to be any better this year than it's been in the past, no matter who the GOP nominee is. And if it's Huckabee, the odds are overwhelming that will get much worse.

I've written extensively about the sense of smug superiority that's settled into the SBC over the past few years, much of it drawn from an essential belief that their special relationship with God not only makes them morally superior to the rest of us, but also exempts them from the need to observe the law. Beyond that: they're openly committed to tearing down the rule of law entirely and replacing it with a theocracy -- and have taken the leading role in the effort to put judges onto the bench who will enforce their Biblical order in the meantime.

The belief that our democratic government is illegitimate, coupled with the arrogance of the twice-born, has already led them into all kinds of serious legal trouble. A brief recap of posts that Dave and I have done in just the past year demonstrates this more than adequately. The church is currently embroiled in a year-long scandal -- to which it has made no effective policy response whatsoever -- involving over 50 ministers arrested (and many convicted) on charges of sexually abusing children in their congregations. They have also allied themselves with hate groups promoting anti-gay violence (including one that's been implicated in at least one murder). One of the SBC's national leaders has gone on record defending torture as scriptural; another lost his military chaplaincy when it was discovered he was keeping a sex slave. His fellow SBC pastors knew -- but they looked the other way.

And, of course, there's the fact that the church's national leadership has already proven itself -- twice over -- more than happy to break the law specifically so it could endorse Huckabee. And this happened long before Huck had a ghost of a chance in a primary. Since Huckabee is himself an SBC minister, it's not out of line to presume that the church will be uniquely aggressive (and, perhaps, characteristically lawless) in campaigning for one of its own. This is the shot they've been waiting for -- and they've got every incentive not to let a little thing like the IRS stand in the way.